Opting Out of Christmas

I stalked someone last Saturday.

He was in his early thirties, wearing a toque and a puffy vest, and he was walking through lines of cars in a parking lot.

I was stealthily driving a car, looking for a parking spot at a mall during the Christmas season.

As I coasted through the lot, trying to predict which aisle of cars he was parked in so I could turn up it and grab his spot, I was once again reminded of how much I hate Christmas.

Not the eating food, getting drunk, seeing friends and family Christmas, but the buying loads of gifts part that comes first.

Inside the mall I perused endless rows of merchandise that I knew no friend or family member had any use for. Jolly Christmas music was blaring but the people around me all had anxious frowns.

Each person’s face said they had a lot of people to buy for and no idea what to buy.

The calculus of reciprocation is perfected at Christmas. Every person you buy a gift for knows they have to buy you one too.

Occasions where this breaks down are rare. Last year, my buddy Wayne showed up for a dinner at my mother-in-law’s bearing a gift.

“Shit,” I thought, “I didn’t get him anything”. By dinner-time the host, my wife’s step father, had managed to find an unworn shirt in his closet that we hastily wrapped and presented to Wayne.

Now Wayne is on my list of people to buy presents for, just in case he pulls the same move this year.

In an apparent attempt to simplify things a little, my mother-in-law’s enormous, extended household created a gift exchange system where people draw names each year to determine the givers and receivers of next year’s gifts.

This exchange has become like a black market that exists alongside a legitimate market instead of replacing it. We still give gifts to all the usual people – like my mother-in-law or my sister-in-law’s boyfriend – but now we also give additional gifts to people outside that loop.

This just makes things worse, because if there is anything harder than buying a gift for someone you know who has everything, it’s buying a gift for someone you barely know at all. (I have to admit that some of my favourite gifts were received this way, which just goes to show the value of a fresh perspective.)

It seems to me that opting out of Christmas should be an acceptable and polite, even commendable, action.

The problem is that if I announce I’m not buying gifts for anyone besides my parents and my wife, it likely won’t stop other people from buying gifts for me and then I’ll just look selfish and rude.

Trying to agree on cheaper gifts creates the same problem. My wife and I decided a few weeks ago that we’d go easy on the gifts for each other this year, because we recently went on an expensive trip to Europe.

“By the way,” she announced to me a few days ago. “I spent $100 on your presents, so you better get me something good.”

Then there is the bizarre, rapacious custom of the Christmas tree. The colossal expenditure of resources on gifts, over-eating and alcoholism is apparently not sufficient for Western appetites: we also need to cut down millions of trees.

“I think we should get a fake tree this year,” my wife said in late November.

“Sounds good to me,” I agreed, because it sounded easier than getting a real one, not because I believe that fake trees are better for the environment.

A week later and she’d changed her mind. A real tree had become an urgent necessity.

I protested vigorously. Again, not out of any concern for the environment (“they’re a crop,” I told myself), but because for the two of us, purchasing a Christmas tree is like buying an argument and taking it home.

I vividly recall trying to set up the tree last year. I was on my hands and knees, dripping sweat, with a hammer in one hand and some giant nails in the other, trying to nail the damn thing into the tree stand.

I was covered in sticky sap and I kept getting jabbed by prickly branches.

Meanwhile, my wife was standing as far away as possible from the tree, supporting it with a single pine needle grasped between thumb and forefinger.

“Can you please hold it by the trunk and keep it straight!” I asked in a demanding, impatient tone that immediately kicked off a raging argument.

We managed to avoid getting into an argument over it this year. But I still want to opt out of Christmas.

[tags]Christmas[/tags]